[MAILBOX-199] Maildir support for Windows

• Type: New Feature
• Status: Closed
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Won't Fix
• Component/s: maildir
• Environment: Windows 7 Professional
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Robin Bankhead
• Created: 24/Sep/13 13:47
• Updated: 05/May/22 04:34
• Resolved: 05/May/22 04:34

Description

Propose that Maildir be supported under the Windows platform. To my knowledge, the only technical bar to this is that maildir uses the colon (":") character, which is an illegal character on the NTFS (and I believe also FAT*) filesystem.

The Maildir standard document[1] that this project refers to, specifies a colon (although quite obliquely). The "standard" clearly was never aimed at use on Windows, but its benefits as a format strike me as sufficiently great that a small deviation is justifiable in order to include it with James and thus increase platform-portability.

The below patch alters message-naming so that, instead of a literal colon, the local system's path separator character (java.io.File.pathSeparator) is used in each case, giving a colon on *NIX and a semicolon (";") on Windows. (Critique of this particular methodology is welcome.)

It also includes a quick fix for an issue encountered with file locking on Windows, which calls System.gc() on that platform. There may be other issues like this; I'm searching for them currently.

[1] http://cr.yp.to/proto/maildir.html

Discussion about this issue: http://www.mail-archive.com/[e-mail]/msg14542.html